Messaging systems are popular tools for today's mobile society. Many users exchange text and other messages, which can be composed and read on small text messengers, often found on mobile telephones. Because mobile telephones and other messaging devices are portable, users are able to exchange text and other messages wherever they may be.
Mobile phones and other text messengers have several limitations. For one, these devices can display only a limited number of character sets. As one example, a mobile telephone communicating using Short Message Service (“SMS”) is configured to display English-language characters only. That is, the mobile phone has installed on it a platform that supports only English-language characters. Thus, when the mobile phone receives a message in Chinese characters, the message cannot be properly displayed.
FIG. 1 shows a prior art system 100 that includes a mobile phone 101 coupled to a message sever 115. The message server 115 is coupled over a wide area network 116, such as the Internet, to another mobile phone 130. The mobile phone 101 is used to compose and send a message 105 in Chinese characters. The message server 115 receives the message 105 and transmits it over the wide area network 116 to the mobile phone 130. The mobile phone 130 is not configured to display Chinese characters. Thus, when the mobile phone receives and tries to display the message 105, it instead displays a message 111 of characters that indicate that the message 105 cannot be properly displayed.
One solution is to store on the mobile phone font packages that contain characters and fonts of other languages. In the above example, a font package that contains Chinese character fonts must be installed on or otherwise made available to the mobile phone 130. This solution is expensive, requires additional memory, which may not be available on portable devices, and does not scale well. Moreover, each individual mobile phone must be customized for each user.